Was Neil Simon’s “screwball comedy” that funny—or that screwball—in the first place? I guess it must have been. It was certainly a big hit with the young Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley 43 years ago. But an adequate 1967 film version with Mr. Redford and Jane Fonda I’ve seen some of on TV looks badly dated. The Odd Couple—miscast or not—remains vintage Neil Simon at his best. But it’s difficult to see how the original Barefoot in the Park has become such a classic in the intervening 43 years that it merits a major Broadway revival.

My 90-year-old aunt in England doesn’t think it’s worth reviving. I wouldn’t introduce her, but Aunt Marie knows a thing or two. Whenever we talk by phone, she always says to me, “Seen any good theater lately—dare I ask?”

When I said I was about to see Barefoot in the Park, she sounded very surprised. “Why on earth would they revive it?” she asked. “It’s so old-fashioned.”

Now, if my English aunt at 90 years of age knows it’s old-fashioned, what do the seven big-shot producers of Barefoot in the Park know that she doesn’t know? What do they know, and when did they know it? What does Scott Elliott know? And what does the show’s stylish costume designer Isaac Mizrahi know?

Mr. Mizrahi, it so happens, knows a lot and I won’t hear a word against him, unless it’s from me. I have thought highly of the boy ever since I heard him sing “A Cup of Coffee, A Sandwich And You” while creating a frock on a sewing machine during his own one-man show. Mr. Mizrahi designed the costumes for Mr. Elliott’s revival of The Women in 2001, and the curtain call of the entire cast wearing vintage 1930’s underwear was the high point. If Mr. Mizrahi has a flaw in his costume designs for the theater, however, it is that he’s incapable of creating anything remotely drab.

For example, the young heroine’s dreaded mother (played by Jill Clayburgh) in Barefoot in the Park is described in the script as someone who “has not bothered to look after herself these past few years. She could use a permanent and a whole new wardrobe.”

A permanent? Neil Simon means a perm, we assume. A perm? But a woman who needs a whole new wardrobe ought not to enter looking more stylish than her own daughter. The glamorous and even chic Ms. Clayburgh is meant to look like a frump. You can take 1960’s nostalgia too far—much too far. Mr. Mizrahi will be designing the costumes for Mr. Elliott’s new production of The Threepenny Opera in April. Memo to them both: Brecht has never been performed chic.

But the look of the Barefoot in the Park production, with its retro-60’s set design and fifth-floor walk-up by Derek McLane, isn’t to blame for what’s gone wrong. Nor the inexperienced leads. Nor even its sound—Petula Clark singing “Downtown,” which gives the impression that the action is all happening in the wild and wacky Village. (It’s actually taking place in the nondescript East 40’s off Third, but no matter.) The creaky script itself simply doesn’t hold up. A million TV sitcoms since Mr. Simon wrote Barefoot in the Park in 1963 have made it unsavably dated.

A while ago, I was on a panel discussion about the Broadway season with Mr. Elliott, the founder of the New Group. He explained that it was time to revive Barefoot in the Park and look at it again. He presented an enthusiastic case for it having meaningful things to say to us today about the flush of love and the reality of marriage. But I couldn’t help but fear that the director, whose specialty is social realism (the British plays of Mike Leigh; the recent fine revival of Hurlyburly), was talking about a minor Neil Simon comedy as if it were a neglected Ibsen.

Underneath Mr. Simon’s typical froth is Mr. Simon’s typical froth. Or as the lady said, “There is no there there.” Corie Bratter (Amanda Peet) is the newly married wifey. She’s the kind of madcap, spontaneous spirit who loves to walk barefoot in the park in the middle of winter. As I write this, it’s so freezing cold outside that everybody’s at home in bed. It wouldn’t bother Corie! She’d be outside walking barefoot in the park! And you know why? Because she’s adorable.

Corie Bratter is not for me. But Irene Bullock is. As long as Carole Lombard plays Irene Bullock in the 1936 My Man Godfrey, she’s irresistibly for me. I was glad to see the enduring screwball film classic again after seeing Barefoot in the Park. It reminds us of the possibilities. On the other hand, repressed Paul (Patrick Wilson) is Corie’s young husband. He’s a conventional lawyer, a stuffed shirt in a business suit who’s middle-aged about 25 years before his time. What did Corie ever see in him? And vice versa. Well, he’s handsome, she’s pretty. And Mr. Simon has thus written an expertly programmed sitcom in two acts about the comic “horrors” of marriage once the honeymoon is over, with “zany” subplot.

There’s also Corie’s well-meaning old mum (Ms. Clayburgh)—a familiar comic stereotype of the interfering mother-in-law who’s meant to be “lovable.” Is she Jewish? (As one of my colleagues explained, “Yes and no.”) There’s an aging lothario, Victor Velasco (played by Tony Roberts in a beret), who will surely pursue secretly willing widowed Mum (who will pretend to be shocked). Victor is some kind of broke artist or unemployed chef. He’s the original wild and crazy guy who cooks exotic stuff like kimchi and eats really strange foreign food in Queens (both sources of much hilarity).

All the neighbors in the building are “crazy” like Victor. “Do you know we have some of the greatest weirdos in the country right here, in this house?” says Paul.

“Really,” says Corie. “Like who?”

“Well ... Mr. and Mrs. Bosco.”

“Who are they?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Bosco are a lovely young couple who just happen to be of the same sex and no one knows which one that is.”

Only in New York, folks. But Paul names other tenants with “peculiar” names—foreign sort of names. “In Apartment 3C live Mr. and Mrs. Gonzales.”

“So?” says Corie.

“I’m not through. Mr. and Mrs. Gonzales, Mr. and Mrs. Armanariz, and Mr. Calhoun ... who must be the umpire.”

What’s the joke? But Mr. Simon is on a roll. “No one knows who lives in Apartment 4D,” Paul continues. “No one has come in or gone out in three years except every morning there are nine empty cans of tuna fish outside the door …. ”

“No kidding,” says Corie, the comic feed. “Who do you think lives there?”

“Well, it sounds like a big cat with a can opener.”

It’s pretty tame, isn’t it? Yet fans of Neil Simon insist that he’s a comic master who never descended to the level of gags and one-liners. And to that I say: Tell it to the big cat with the can opener.

Barefoot in the Park was Mr. Simon’s first hit, and the chemistry of the theater ingénue named Robert Redford—“my golden goy,” as Barbra Streisand described him—and the always attractive Elizabeth Ashley is said to have made it appealing. But Patrick Wilson—who’s been so successful in musicals—blandly lacks a certain sexual magnetism, and, alas, Amanda Peet is trying much too hard. Tony Roberts and Jill Clayburgh are troupers, to say the least. Adam Sietz plays the nameless Telephone Repairman who’s wise about marriage. He says that marriages keep breaking down now and then, like telephones. But they have a way of getting fixed.

Those were the days!

Was Neil Simon’s “screwball comedy” that funny—or that screwball—in the first place? I guess it must have been. It was certainly a big hit with the young Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley 43 years ago. But an adequate 1967 film version with Mr. Redford and Jane Fonda I’ve seen some of on TV looks badly dated. The Odd Couple—miscast or not—remains vintage Neil Simon at his best. But it’s difficult to see how the original Barefoot in the Park has become such a classic in the intervening 43 years that it merits a major Broadway revival.

My 90-year-old aunt in England doesn’t think it’s worth reviving. I wouldn’t introduce her, but Aunt Marie knows a thing or two. Whenever we talk by phone, she always says to me, “Seen any good theater lately—dare I ask?”

When I said I was about to see Barefoot in the Park, she sounded very surprised. “Why on earth would they revive it?” she asked. “It’s so old-fashioned.”

Now, if my English aunt at 90 years of age knows it’s old-fashioned, what do the seven big-shot producers of Barefoot in the Park know that she doesn’t know? What do they know, and when did they know it? What does Scott Elliott know? And what does the show’s stylish costume designer Isaac Mizrahi know?

Mr. Mizrahi, it so happens, knows a lot and I won’t hear a word against him, unless it’s from me. I have thought highly of the boy ever since I heard him sing “A Cup of Coffee, A Sandwich And You” while creating a frock on a sewing machine during his own one-man show. Mr. Mizrahi designed the costumes for Mr. Elliott’s revival of The Women in 2001, and the curtain call of the entire cast wearing vintage 1930’s underwear was the high point. If Mr. Mizrahi has a flaw in his costume designs for the theater, however, it is that he’s incapable of creating anything remotely drab.

For example, the young heroine’s dreaded mother (played by Jill Clayburgh) in Barefoot in the Park is described in the script as someone who “has not bothered to look after herself these past few years. She could use a permanent and a whole new wardrobe.”

A permanent? Neil Simon means a perm, we assume. A perm? But a woman who needs a whole new wardrobe ought not to enter looking more stylish than her own daughter. The glamorous and even chic Ms. Clayburgh is meant to look like a frump. You can take 1960’s nostalgia too far— much too far. Mr. Mizrahi will be designing the costumes for Mr. Elliott’s new production of The Threepenny Opera in April. Memo to them both: Brecht has never been performed chic.

But the look of the Barefoot in the Park production, with its retro-60’s set design and fifth-floor walk-up by Derek McLane, isn’t to blame for what’s gone wrong. Nor the inexperienced leads. Nor even its sound—Petula Clark singing “Downtown,” which gives the impression that the action is all happening in the wild and wacky Village. (It’s actually taking place in the nondescript East 40’s off Third, but no matter.) The creaky script itself simply doesn’t hold up. A million TV sitcoms since Mr. Simon wrote Barefoot in the Park in 1963 have made it unsavably dated.

A while ago, I was on a panel discussion about the Broadway season with Mr. Elliott, the founder of the New Group. He explained that it was time to revive Barefoot in the Park and look at it again. He presented an enthusiastic case for it having meaningful things to say to us today about the flush of love and the reality of marriage. But I couldn’t help but fear that the director, whose specialty is social realism (the British plays of Mike Leigh; the recent fine revival of Hurlyburly), was talking about a minor Neil Simon comedy as if it were a neglected Ibsen.

Underneath Mr. Simon’s typical froth is Mr. Simon’s typical froth. Or as the lady said, “There is no there there.” Corie Bratter (Amanda Peet) is the newly married wifey. She’s the kind of madcap, spontaneous spirit who loves to walk barefoot in the park in the middle of winter. As I write this, it’s so freezing cold outside that everybody’s at home in bed. It wouldn’t bother Corie! She’d be outside walking barefoot in the park! And you know why? Because she’s adorable.

Corie Bratter is not for me. But Irene Bullock is. As long as Carole Lombard plays Irene Bullock in the 1936 My Man Godfrey, she’s irresistibly for me. I was glad to see the enduring screwball film classic again after seeing Barefoot in the Park. It reminds us of the possibilities. On the other hand, repressed Paul (Patrick Wilson) is Corie’s young husband. He’s a conventional lawyer, a stuffed shirt in a business suit who’s middle-aged about 25 years before his time. What did Corie ever see in him? And vice versa. Well, he’s handsome, she’s pretty. And Mr. Simon has thus written an expertly programmed sitcom in two acts about the comic “horrors” of marriage once the honeymoon is over, with “zany” subplot.

There’s also Corie’s well-meaning old mum (Ms. Clayburgh)—a familiar comic stereotype of the interfering mother-in-law who’s meant to be “lovable.” Is she Jewish? (As one of my colleagues explained, “Yes and no.”) There’s an aging lothario, Victor Velasco (played by Tony Roberts in a beret), who will surely pursue secretly willing widowed Mum (who will pretend to be shocked). Victor is some kind of broke artist or unemployed chef. He’s the original wild and crazy guy who cooks exotic stuff like kimchi and eats really strange foreign food in Queens (both sources of much hilarity).

All the neighbors in the building are “crazy” like Victor. “Do you know we have some of the greatest weirdos in the country right here, in this house?” says Paul.

“Really,” says Corie. “Like who?”

“Well ... Mr. and Mrs. Bosco.”

“Who are they?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Bosco are a lovely young couple who just happen to be of the same sex and no one knows which one that is.”

Only in New York, folks. But Paul names other tenants with “peculiar” names—foreign sort of names. “In Apartment 3C live Mr. and Mrs. Gonzales.”

“So?” says Corie.

“I’m not through. Mr. and Mrs. Gonzales, Mr. and Mrs. Armanariz, and Mr. Calhoun ... who must be the umpire.”

What’s the joke? But Mr. Simon is on a roll. “No one knows who lives in Apartment 4D,” Paul continues. “No one has come in or gone out in three years except every morning there are nine empty cans of tuna fish outside the door …. ”

“No kidding,” says Corie, the comic feed. “Who do you think lives there?”

“Well, it sounds like a big cat with a can opener.”

It’s pretty tame, isn’t it? Yet fans of Neil Simon insist that he’s a comic master who never descended to the level of gags and one-liners. And to that I say: Tell it to the big cat with the can opener.

Barefoot in the Park was Mr. Simon’s first hit, and the chemistry of the theater ingénue named Robert Redford—“my golden goy,” as Barbra Streisand described him—and the always attractive Elizabeth Ashley is said to have made it appealing. But Patrick Wilson—who’s been so successful in musicals—blandly lacks a certain sexual magnetism, and, alas, Amanda Peet is trying much too hard. Tony Roberts and Jill Clayburgh are troupers, to say the least. Adam Sietz plays the nameless Telephone Repairman who’s wise about marriage. He says that marriages keep breaking down now and then, like telephones. But they have a way of getting fixed.

Those were the days!

Wall Streeters prop up the real estate bubble in anticipation of juicy year-end pay-outs; not since before 9/11 have finance folks been compensated for their troubles so handily.

Fine, we'll say it: Brooklyn Is The New Philadelphia, the sexy suburb that could. No longer the sadsack spot where losers go when they fail out of Manhattan, Brooklyn finally has it all going on.

Aaaaaaaagh, George Gurley and his lover Hilly are back in couples therapy.

Even Bush I isn't afraid of Al Jazeera any more; Here comes Al Jaz Int'l.

Back to Canada with ya, eh? Michael Ignatieff says see ya to America, off to save his homeland.

Harvard Law School, a hungry hungry hippo for conservatives.

Nerve.com sex columnist plans to wed! But what of the lust in the dust?

The Nazi line is from Aunt Dan and Lemon , Mr. Shawn's 1985 play now revived by Scott Elliott's enterprising New Group at the Clurman Theatre. His horrible premise, in a nutshell, is that the German death camps had a point . The playwright himself doesn't believe this, of course. As his bedridden, anorexic young heroine, Lemon (short for Leonora), puts it: "There's something inside us that likes to kill. Some part of us. Why wouldn't that be so? Our nature is derived from the nature of animals, and of course there's a part of animal nature that likes to kill. If killing were totally repugnant to animals, they couldn't survive. So an enjoyment of killing is there inside us."

It's an extraordinarily simpleminded, reductive argument. But it's not the frivolous Wally who's making it. The deadly serious, guilt-trip Wally is making it, and his point is that civilized societies are no different in the violent, self-serving essentials than Nazi Germany. Mr. Shawn intends to provoke us into identifying with the sick, bedridden heroine of Aunt Dan and Lemon -to see something, at least, of our civilized selves in her.

"In polite society," Lemon goes on about the pleasure of killing, "people don't discuss it, but it's enjoyable-it's enjoyable-to make plans for killing, and it's enjoyable to learn about killing that is done by other people, and it's enjoyable to think about killing, and it's enjoyable to read about killing, and it's even enjoyable actually to kill, although when we ourselves are actually killing, an element of unpleasantness always comes in."

True or false? Do you buy it? Do you see yourself ? For myself, the man or woman who has never had a violent feeling-or wished to kill someone, preferably a partner-has never truly lived. But Mr. Shawn's smug, all-inclusive pieties in the name of "honesty" give a liberal conscience a bad name. His kernel of undeniable truth that the violence of the strong and callous dominates the weak doesn't mean we're all no better than serial killers or those "refreshing'' Nazis. But look how the sweeping argument is justified in the degenerate moral void:

"It's no different from the fact that if I have harmful or obnoxious insects-let's say, cockroaches-living in my house, I probably have to do something about it. Or at least, the question I have to ask is: How many are there? If the cockroaches are small, and I see a few of them now and then, that may not be very disturbing to me. But if I see big ones, if I start to see them often, then I say to myself, they have to be killed."

Well, you get the message. No one contradicts it in the play. (Disagreement-or guilt-is up to the audience). Aunt Dan and Lemon is scarcely a play in the formal sense, more a series of long, windy monologues that take place in London during the Vietnam War. Aunt Dan (short for Danielle) is meant to be the brilliant intellectual of the piece, a right-wing, American-born Oxford don and murky bisexual who's infatuated with Henry Kissinger. "A simple man, Lemon," she describes him lovingly to her disciple. "A simple, warm, affectionate man."

Now, we know that allegedly brilliant people can be utterly stupid. (Look at the historian and Holocaust denier, David Irving). But Aunt Dan takes the strudel. We need a dialectic with muscle and intelligence, but Mr. Shawn gives us only an empty-headed teenager with a crush.

"You see, I don't care if he's vain or boastful-maybe he is!" she simpers about Mr. Kissinger. "I don't care if he goes out with beautiful girls or likes to ride around on a yacht with millionaires and sheikhs. Alright-he enjoys life! Is that a bad thing? Maybe the fact that he enjoys life inspires all his efforts to preserve life, to do what he does every day to make our lives possible."

Mr. Shawn's Oxford professor and her sick, child-like disciple speak with the same voice, the same platitudes. The irony shows more with Aunt Dan, that's all. The ambling, plotless evening includes a subplot of graphic porn that threatens to dominate everything else. It concerns Mindy, a free-spirited London girl or hooker (and lover of Aunt Dan) who drugs and strangles some lowlife after mutual blow jobs. It's a sordid world, right?

The link Mr. Shawn makes between a loveless, "civilized" society and violent pornography is as labored as his clumsy cockroach metaphor. It lingers on the porn with a lip-smacking prurience and leaves us indifferent. There you are-Mr. Shawn will no doubt claim-it all goes to show how desensitized we've become! We, too, are Aunt Dan and Lemon.

But that is the goading low debate and double bluff of the play. It's like opposing President Bush and being accused of not being a patriot. If you aren't engaged by Aunt Dan and Lemon , you're failing to see the truth about yourself. If you can kill a cockroach, why not a human being?

Lemon is played by the spooky Lili Taylor (in an anachronistic Les Miz T-shirt); I found Kristen Johnston too young and jolly for Aunt Dan. Some of the British accents are all over the map. Nor is Mr. Elliott's direction always tightly in focus. It took flighty Mindy an eternity, it seemed, to tie her drugged victim to the bedposts before subsequently schlepping him offstage in a plastic bag.

My colleague Michael Feingold of The Village Voice points out illuminatingly that The Last Letter at the Lucille Lortel Theatre is the answer to the questions posed by Aunt Dan and Lemon , and though he's more generous about Mr. Shawn's play than I am, he concludes that it's "tiny by comparison." For The Last Letter is no second-hand "debate," but a shattering testament to a world of terrible suffering.

Set in a Nazi-occupied village in the Ukraine, the short, hour-long play is a Jewish mother's letter to her son beyond the barbed wire about her last days in the ghetto before she's executed. Adapted from Vasily Grossman's epic novel, Life and Fate , it's a remarkably clear-eyed monologue resisting easy sentiment and performed by one of our very finest actresses, Kathleen Chalfant.

Grossman's own mother-a schoolteacher-died in a Nazi massacre, and The Last Letter is his imagined link to her. But, alas, the adapter and director, filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, has overplayed his hand by encouraging his lighting designer, Donald Holder, to "paint pictures" in arty light and shadow. At times, it's as if there are two actors onstage: the ham role played by a hundred intrusive lighting effects and the central role played by the great actress. But in the end, nothing can overwhelm Ms. Chalfant's performance, which is so pure and unadorned that she doesn't even seem to be acting. She simply and humanely is . She is evidence of what tragically was and still will be. She is the truth.